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On the Road Toward One Billion Cars

Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors, displaying the Nano in New Delhi on Thursday. (Photo by Money Sharma/European Pressphoto Association)

Hold on to your steering wheel. India – where roads are already in near-constant gridlock — took a big step toward mainstreaming car culture, and sending the world on a path to surpass 1 billion cars by 2020, with the unveiling of the $2,500 Nano. The vest-pocket four-seater has an engine barely bigger than those powering some American lawn mowers.

The Times has some wonderful coverage today of both the congested reality of India’s streets, by Somini Sengupta, and the allure of this car and automobile transport more generally, on the Wheels blog.

In November, Tom Friedman wrote about this car and the climate and energy crossroads the world faces as developing countries prepare to replicate Western wealth-driven ways, warning in the headline, “No, No, No, Don’t Follow Us.”

But it seems clear that the attraction of personal mobility – a kind of transportation echo of freedom itself – is a hard notion to tamp down. There’s a good overview of a world headed toward a billion cars in this 2006 Wall Street Journal story.

What ideas are out there for shaping transportation choices as China, India, Mexico, and other countries race toward prosperity so they avoid the traps of sprawl, of ever-growing demand for liquid fuels, of the insulation from community that comes when you’re camped alone on a congested freeway?

I’ll be exploring the theme of sustainable mobility this year and would love some direction and ideas.

Wow, at that price a guy could afford to buy his wife a new pair of Tatas. Bring them home and everyone in the neighborhood would shout, “Hey, nice Tatas!” And you could just smile, knowing that you got a great deal.

Speaking of which, we’re still waiting for the additional photos of Miss Mother Russia. Or did I miss that somewhere?

Tom Friedman is right to be afraid. I am too. This is very bad news indeed!

On the other hand, we have had our orgy for the last hundred years. Who are we to deny that privilege to other countries . . .

No, really the priority should be on developing $2,500 fuel efficient cars . . . And showing through our example, a new way of life, with less cars, more bikes, great public transportation, people walking for exercise, car sharing, etc.

What a terrible number 1 billion cars. Last September when I went back to my hometown I heard that 150 cars are selt everyday in my hometown (my hometown is about 2 million population). It growth very big. We should worry about this problem. We could not let them not buy cars. I think that the best way is to develop populic trasfer and change car’s style to electric car or hybird car, make them cheaper than gasoline cars. Or charge the road make people want to save then control them to drive. Weststyle life deeply affect the world. People pursue weststyle life. West people should change their life style give the world an good example. And developing countries should control this bed trend and show people a good direction. But now the developing countries loose their envrionmental sense just pursue economy growth depending on fossil fuel.

Sometimes I don’t get members of my own Party (assuming most of the comments above were left by Democrats). We complain about lower-income citizens of the developing world acquiring cars, yet we are not prepared to do anything to discourage them from doing so.

Why should we have about 1 car per capita, yet India and China have only about 02 car per capita.

Are we prepared to pay Chinese and Indians thousands of dollars a year to not drive?

Question asked: “What ideas are out there for shaping transportation choices as China, India, Mexico, and other countries race toward prosperity so they avoid the traps of sprawl, of ever-growing demand for liquid fuels, of the insulation from community that comes when you’re camped alone on a congested freeway?”

Problem is: People in those countries don’t want choices, they want cars, cars, cars — and they want prosperity, the sooner the better and tomorrow be damned — and they’ll need liquid fuels to power those cars, the future be damned — and they don’t care about the insulation from community by being in a traffic jam or congested freeway, they want what the wealthy developed world has and they want it in spades. It’s not going to be a pretty picture.

It’s 2008. Come back in 3008 and see what human culture has wrought. Global gridlock. ”Glogrid”, as the Australians might say, following their coinage of ”globesity”.

Of course, maybe by 3008, intelligent driverless cars will have replaced the need for human beings on Earth at all, and the “machines” will have completely taken over and autoparadise will be heaven on Earth. No humans, just machines. All over. Doing everything. Even getting their “hair” done.

Chorus: “Here come the Tata Nanos, step right up, step right up, the future is just around the corner!”

Actual comment: these Tata Nanos would have been great in 1920. Now? Surreal!

The Nano is a great idea, as a temporary stop-gap and for very particular environments like in India and China. Imagine getting sideswiped by an 18-wheeler on I-80 in that thing. The trucker would never even know.

But it still uses oil and that’s dumb. Brazil has switched most of their vehicles to ethanol, and the world should follow suit. Having a billion cars would be fine, comparatively, if those cars didn’t run on fossil fuel. We have far more forks (random example) that are doing very little damage, and clean-running cars would be relatively harmless.

To Patricia (#5): I wouldn’t be so hasty to make assumptions about party membership. This blog is available world-wide to readers of English. Even in the US, I don’t think the correlation between party and climate views is complete. Furthermore, considering the many state laws that coerce party membership in return for primary election participation, and the nevertheless huge and growing numbers of registered independents, it is obvious that a large majority of US voters don’t give a darn about party membership.

delhi and other indian cities had too much pollution from vehicles even 10 years ago. the traffic signals did not work in places. if the car broke down at a signal, one would have to push it through, with cars bearing down from four directions and no traffic cop or tow vehicle in sight. then kids would walk up and down the car(we were assured that at 5 miles per hour in the traffic nothing would happen. no seat belts either). respiratory illnesses,especially among kids was very common.

when friedman’s tells india ‘not to copy us’ he is way off.

what india needs is low-pollution technology(hybrid cars ?). gas is also much more expensive there.being in a car is safer than in an autorickshaw or on a scooter with trucks and buses all around

A car that allows a family to have greater security than a scooter(remember most people in this part of the world travel in a scooter and that is not very safe!), is easy on the pocke (read somewhere that it is half as expensive as the next cheapest car) and is friendly to the environment…. is a thing to applaud.

Danny Bloom (#7) is right. People throughout the poor world want to be rich, or at least better off than they are, and cars are a sure sign of attaining the desired higher status. As Sophie Tucker once said (reportedly), “I have been poor and I have been rich. Rich is better.” It would be hard to find an honest American that would not agree with that. We have created a lifestyle that is the envy of the world, emulated almost everywhere, but a growing number of us don’t believe that it is sustainable on a finite planet.

Globalization has been partly about trade and a host of economic issues, but it has also been about Americanization or at least Westernization. It has been about “progress.” Walk the streets of Paris and note how McDonalds are overflowing with people; walk through Madrid and count the Starbucks; walk around Beijing and see the KFCs. As geographer Brett Wallach commented, “We’re in this globalization to our eyeballs, and we’re in it together, regardless of our passports and bank books.” It has become the grand spreading of an unproved but important assumption of neoclassical economics: economic growth can go on forever.

Dan Stackhouse (#8) is right about the fact that it is too bad that these new Tatas use gasoline, but, despite so much talk to the contrary, more ideal means of moving cars around, especially one billion of them, don’t exist. I disagree that ethanol would be better–one billion cars running on ethanol would challenge the world’s farmers, corn or sugar or whatever, and food production would become less profitable than fuel production. Even in the U.S. our emphasis on more ethanol use is “fuelish,” and the politics of it is transparent: we subsidize ethanol from corn and oppose importing sugar-based ethanol from Brazil. This is the kind of planning that realistically has to be seen for our future.

What will the developing countries do about cars and gasoline? Probably follow us down the same path because we have made it look so tempting.

What should they do? Ask some fundamental questions that we’ve managed to skip over. For example, what is a car for? If it is purely for transportation, then look at alternatives, e.g. moving points A and B (say residence and work) closer together, improve public transit systems, use bicycles, walk. If, on the other hand, the car is a symbol of much more, then we are in trouble, and I think we are. As Americans become more obese they join health clubs, to which they must drive their SUVs.

Most of the world is not going to move easily toward a world of lower fossil fuel consumption unless there are either considerable incentives to do so or considerable prices to be paid if they don’t (or some combination of the two).

One wild card in our autobillionaire future is oil itself. Though economists and other eternal optimists have not yet figured that the supply of crude oil is a limited resource, a growing number of petroleum geologists speak about peak oil, a time when world oil production peaks, then starts downward, perhaps after sitting around a plateau for some unknown time period. Ask an average American when U.S. oil production might reach a peak, then check out the surprised look when you tell him/her that it peaked in 1970.

When will world oil production peak? Frankly, neither I nor anyone else knows for sure. But the data on oil production in recent years is worth a look. You don’t need to listen to others because the data are readily available. After increasing steadily for many years, world oil production reached a peak in July, 2006, and despite much higher prices daily production since then has not reached that level. Average daily oil production for the first nine months of 2007 was below the 2006 average, despite oil prices knocking on the $100 mark.

What we are looking at is a hugely uncertain future for all of us, as well as for Earth’s ecosystem.

Cars launched by the Tatas have diesel engines, which count for more carbon emission and sound pollution comparing with the Petrel ones; but here in India, neither the politicians nor the media raise their voices against it. This is because industrialists are ruling this country. Politicians and journalists have surrendered their souls to these fat cats so as to get hefty sums by them. And why just blame the politicians and journoes? Aren’t the common folks of this country aware of the fact that we are sitting on a powder keg? There are only a handful few who practice frugality and simplicity, otherwise all are being blinded by the ostentation which, regrettably, is promoted by the westerners. Life lies in simplicity and death in glitz. Glitz is rampant and so the death is near.

People see a billion more vehicles of pollution, what about the extra time people in devloping nations have by not having to walk an hour to work. This improves the quality of life of hundreds of millions and gives them more time to work and get and education. By giving hundreds of millions minds a better chance they now have a shot to create. How many Einsteins an Edisons in the developing world will have more time to discover, invent, and improve our lives?

The Nano is a good concept, in a country like India.A billion cars is fine, but need to keep in mind the infrastructure of the country and the fuel which will run the little nano.When the fuel prices are on the rise, the idea behind nano holds no great significant except for the status symbol of having car for the name sake.

It means a lot when people speak out loudly and clearly, as you are courageously doing, with an unvarnished willingness to say openly what is true, as you see it.

Many too many of our brothers and sisters have chosen to remain silent, even to the extent of adopting poses of hysterical blindness, willful deafness and elective mutism: the well-known and widely used “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” ploy.

Too many of our brothers and sisters have chosen to silently acquiesce, to stand by and allow the absence of necessary constraints on the gigantic scale and growth rate of the global economy to produce the probability of a colossal ecological wreckage in the future.

If our leaders keep doing what they are doing now, we will likely keep getting what are getting now. Dire consequences could result from “staying the course” marked by the selfish, imperious choices of too many current leaders to maximally expand the global economy, regardless of Earth’s limited capacity to support unlimited growth of big-business activity.

By allowing global economic activity to run its current course, come what may, we could unintentionally threaten the lives of our children, biodiversity, global ecosystems and the integrity of Earth.

What kind of a future do we intend for our children? If we keep doing what we are doing now, we could end up leaving our children with a world that is unfit for human habitation. The integrity of the Earth and life as we know it could become dangerously undermined and irreversibly diminished by adamant efforts to endlessly expand the predominant culture’s interlocking national economies, to conspicuously argue for the unrestrained per capita consumption of scarce resources, and to continuously condone the unbridled increase of absolute global human population numbers on a relatively small, finite, noticeably frangible planet with the size and make-up of Earth.

And now we can foresee a billion fossil fuel guzzlers on the horizon.

Perhaps our leaders, who are supposed to be providing reasonable and sensible leadership — not primrose paths to the future — will consider how recklessly expanding production and industrialization activities of the human species in our time could soon become unsustainable in this wondrous planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit………….and not to overwhelm.

Mr. Stackhouse,
Please, please don’t suggest the world should follow suit on ethanol. I just wrote Andy yesterday regarding the continued raping of the Amazonian Rainforests, much of the raping subsidized by dear America, to make way for #@&!ing corn fields for Ethanol. My question to Andy was in our search for cleaner alternatives to gasoline and coal, we must not make just a lateral switch to something equally as damaging. Kind of like a heroin addict switching to morphine……addiction is addiction. Behavior and living style are what have to change.
Soy and Corn are killing Brazil’s rainforests, among other rainforests of the world.

Anyone know, is reincarnation a process that only inhabits a forward movement? If so, I’m praying I’m done with my reappearances here in the flesh on Earth. Jesus…… who would want to come back to what this is proposing?
Danny Bloom is right, kind of like the old movie, “The God’s Must Be Crazy”……developing countries “think” they want what we have, “future be damned”. That illusive “better life”. I would never deny better educational opportunities, cleaner living conditions, lighting, to anyone anywhere. But to replicate “us” would be a horrible mistake. More is not better, damn it!
Elizabeth Tjader

Just a note to add: Tata Motors is the same company that is developing the French car that runs on compressed air, the MINI CAT or CITY CAT car discussed on another thread earlier, and news available via Reuters wire story or Google. The inventor is named Guy Negre. He told Reuters that Tata will start producing his US$7000 car that runs on compressed air — no gasoline or batteries at all — this year. Believe it or not. Maybe Andy can later check on this development, whether true or not.

The climate crisis is forcing us to think short-term (major changes within ten years) as well as long-term. We are simply not going to wean drivers from their cars in the short run, not any more than we are going to redesign cities and transit.

For cars, that means converting engines to clean energy via electricity. While batteries recharged overnight are the obvious choice, one can also use clean electricity to make hydrogen or compressed air. Tata is going to intro a fleet of about 6,000 taxicabs in India later this year (http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/
new_cars/4217016.html) that get about 125 miles on a refill (either at a pump or by running the air engine backwards with a motor overnight).

But this has to be done globally. A fleet of PHEVs requires much mining to make the batteries. Poorer countries would have to import them. “Air cars” that run on compressed air would be easier for a developing country to manufacture from local materials.
No, it’s not a rocket. No electric motor, either. It’s an engine where the compressed air runs a piston. Refilling the air tank can be done overnight by plugging in the on-board compressor. So air cars also run on electricity, just one step removed. It’s the same for hydrogen fuel cell cars.
Just as a spray can cools your hand, so the carbon-fiber air tanks will become quite cold during use. The free air conditioning ought to make air cars popular in the tropics—and elsewhere, as global warming increases. I predict that beer will be cooled this way.

The question I would like to ask Tom is this: Why would China, India and the remainder of the under-developed world stop growing their national economies, just as the US is growing its economy now, while the US, the predominant leader of the over-developed world, remains intransigent and unwilling to so much as openly discuss the necessity for stopping what it is doing now.

What foundation in science, sound reasoning and common sense could possibly suggest that India and China not follow the US by doing precisely what we are doing now — growing the US economy? Is there not ample scientific evidence, sound reasoning and common sense explanations that would tell the leaders of the US, China and India that the time has come to limit its ubiquitous efforts to continuously expand industrial and production capabilities? What is good for the goose is good for the gander, is it not?

Please forgive me for stating the obvious: there are mountains of scientific evidence, plenty of sound reasons and abundant common sense imploring the leaders of India, China, the US and the rest of the over-developed and under-developed world to consider that the seemingly endless, global expansion of large-scale industrialization and production capabilities, now overspreading the surface of Earth, could be approaching a point in history when these unbridled big-business activities could dangerously destablize frangible global ecosystems, irreversibly degrade the environment, recklessly dissipate Earth’s natural resource base and, perhaps, destroy our planetary home as a fit place for human habitation by our children.

In Pune India I photographed a small card table in front of a bank, with a sign “Cheap loans for buying two-wheelers”. Unfortunately for Pune (the motor vehicle capital of India) there was not a walkable sidewalk in front of that bank.

All over Asia two wheelers and cars have invaded space otherwise reserved for walking, cycling, waiting for buses or buses themselves. Cities were totally unprepared for the onslaught of two wheelers (check out Hanoi) and now four wheelers. So its not a question of whether a cheap car is good or bad, rather, is the physical and human infrastructure ready? And the clear answer from our own engagement in that part of the world is no.

A reader above praised the improved security four wheels offers its occupants. But does that same claim apply to pedestrians, or to the remaining foot cyclists or even motor cyclists? The answer is no. these are the people who will be runover, whose sidewalks or cycle ways will be blocked by the cars.

And as the Times story earlier this week and others have pointed out, pollution controls will de factor be lax even if de jure they are strong — because the makers will skimp on the suspensions so the pollution controls will be shaken up, to say the least.

So if we only focus on mobilizing families that otherwise would be on two wheelers (foot or motorozed) or buses, that narrow view says that a cheap car is a good thing.

If we focus on all of urban india, that car alone, without greatly improved pollution control traffic controls, parking enforcement, etc will probably cost India more than it is worth to the individuals who are priveleged to own them. And everyone will be stuck in worse traffic.

Lee Schipper
EMBARQ, the WRI Center for Sustainable Transport

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.